a lecture by Vincent F. A. Golphin

The rise of fear and rage in the United States and throughout the world, the spread of poverty and disease around the globe, and rumors of wars to come, have left most Americans keen to find a the way to a better future. One author and intellectual is convinced the key is the need for a renewed social conscience. Vincent F. A. Golphin, who teaches literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says that is why the time has come to pay deeper attention to the writings of Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Golphin is an insightful observer of social and political developments throughout the United States and the world. Outside the classroom, he is an award-winning writer and journalist. For more than 25 years, his articles, poems, essays and stories have appeared in a wide range of publications that include national magazines such as Christianity Today, National Catholic Reporter, Emerge, Washington Living, and Upstate New Yorker; literary journals such as Bridges, Drylongso, Fyah, Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, Mental Satin, the Southern Poetry Review and the Newhouse and New York Times American news services. Currently, he continues those activities as managing editor of about …time, a national news and feature magazine headquartered in Rochester.

His books include Life and Other Things I Know: Poems, Essays and Short Stories, Take Two, They’re Small and African-American Children’s Anthology. Foothills Publishing will release his latest book, Like A Dry Land, poems based on a visit to Jordan in June 2003, in the spring.

At RIT, he teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Cultural Studies. Also, Golphin frequently lectures on the relevance of the civil rights leaders’ ideas.